A leaked document shows she believes that "effective implementation of EU human rights policy requires more frequent meetings and standing capability" of expertise in Brussels. She also said Twitter, YouTube and Facebook had played a big part in the "Arab Spring" and suggested the EU could use social media for "digital diplomacy".

Lady Ashton also wants a ban on selling technology that helps dictators to snoop on their citizens. The document said the EU's "exemplary" record on human rights would help its attempts to promote high standards throughout the world.

The row centres on whether the UK is obliged to pay benefits in certain circumstances to nationals from Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein as a result of agreements between the EU and the European Economic Area countries. Ministers argue Britain has an opt-out clause, under existing treaties, from rules introduced last year to "coordinate social security systems" between the EU and EEA.

It is feared the EU plan could turn Britain into a magnet for so-called "welfare tourists" and cost British taxpayers around 1 billion pounds a year. The UK says it is within its right to stop "non-active" migrants from outside the EU receiving benefits and has taken the case to the European Court of Justice arguing that an EU decision in July was legally unsound and therefore invalid.

Ministers say nation states should remain in control of determining their own social security arrangements. Mr Grayling said yesterday: "The Government is absolutely clear in taking this to the European Court. We will fight this every inch of the way." He told the Commons European Scrutiny Committee: "It is a really important principle here. We should not simply allow the European Commission to take what we believe is an incorrect legal base."

Nawa-e Waqt bluntly commented on India's Kashmiri water polices and Islamabad's failure up to now to stop New Delhi's efforts to construct hydroelectric dams in Kashmir, "India should be forcibly prevented from constructing these dams. If it fails to constrain itself, we should not hesitate in launching nuclear war because there is no solution except this." Potential nuclear war over water rights - such sentiments ought to light up switchboards from New Delhi to Washington. Needless to say, the fact that both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers is cause for concern.

Nawa-e Waqt is a privately owned, widely read conservative Pakistani Islamic daily with a circulation around 125,000 and is heavily critical of the US and India. To put Nawa-e Waqt's circulation in context, consider that the conservative Washington Times has a current estimated circulation of 50,000. So, what has the editorial board of the Nawa-e Waqt so excited? Indian dam building in the disputed area of Kashmir. Compared with much of South Asia, Kashmir has many rivers and relatively few people.

Bashir Ahmad, a geologist in Srinagar, Kashmir commented grimly about the Indians' future intentions, "They will switch the Indus off to make Pakistan solely dependent on India. It's going to be a water bomb." A more dispassionate report by America's Senate last February offered still a similar assessment, noting, "The cumulative effect of (the dam) projects could give India the ability to store enough water to limit the supply to Pakistan at crucial moments in the growing season" before concluding that dams are a source of "significant bilateral tension."

Pakistan's vulnerability is underwritten by the fact that, like Egypt it exists around a single great river, although the Indus is nearly twice the Nile's size when it reaches the sea. The Indus provides water to over 80 percent of Pakistan's 54 million acres of irrigated land, via a canal system largely built by the British.

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Likewise, they have no prescription for the restoration of growth. The previous EU yardstick under the Growth and Stability Pact set a ceiling for government deficits at 3% of GDP. This assumes a modicum of growth in each economy. What if there is zero or negative growth? Will the budgets be scaled down amidst further austerity?

The previous fixes that left the question of how the current debt was going to be paid evaporated quickly after the financial markets effectively voted no confidence in them. If the markets are sufficiently forgiving to allow a solution to take shape, the summit can be deemed a success. If there is a spike in interest rates, it will be back to the drawing board for the euro zone members.

The situation involving Britain is interesting, as it has boosted the personal popularity of Prime Minister David Cameron to over 60% in a country where Euroskepticism is mainstream. It has also made him a hero within his Conservative Party, earning him adulation from those who but a short time ago were comparing him with Neville Chamberlain for selling out Britain to the European Union.

It has however exacerbated fissures with the Liberal Democratic coalition partner and has even elicited public criticism from David Cameron's deputy Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader. If the Liberal Democrats decided to violate the coalition agreement, they could bring down the government. Neither party to the coalition wants elections...

As storms battered Scotland on Thursday a 300ft turbine exploded like a giant Catherine wheel, showering the countryside with burning debris. Witnesses said fire erupted in the centre of the 2 million pounds turbine in Ardrossan, North Ayrshire, then flames covered the blades. The day before, a turbine at Coldingham in the Scottish Borders was brought crashing down by the wind. Several homes had to be evacuated and a road closed. On Tuesday a turbine put up earlier this year fell in high winds at Scapegoat Hill near Huddersfield.

The three incidents added to concerns about the policy of covering some of Britain's most spectacular land with turbines in the name of green energy and cutting carbon emissions. The Country Guardian organisation warned: "There is a general trend upward in accident numbers over the past 10 years. This is predicted to escalate unless the Health and Safety Executive makes some significant changes, in particular to protect the public by declaring a minimum safe distance between new turbine developments and occupied housing and buildings (currently 2km in Europe), and declaring 'no-go' areas to the public."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will today tell David Cameron in Berlin that the EU treaty changes needed to set up the body should not trigger a referendum in the UK despite pressure from Tory MPs. The memo is also understood to set out that larger eurozone economies which are considered too big to bail out should be allowed to default on their debts, effectively going bankrupt. The document is bound to fuel fears that a powerful economic bloc is emerging in Europe that will effectively be under German control.

Mr Cameron, who will also meet EU President Herman van Rompuy and European Commission President Jose Barroso in Brussels today, was expected to press Mrs Merkel to make the European Central Bank take responsibility for shoring up the euro. Instead, he will be confronted by the ambitious German plan. The fact that Germany appear to have already decided that the British people will be excluded from any say on EU treaty changes will infuriate many Tories.

But Mrs Merkel claimed yesterday that Mr Cameron will come around to her view. She said: "We've seen a sovereign debt crisis evolve in some states and particularly those in the eurozone find themselves in the international focus. It was right of David Cameron to concern himself with the UK's debt issues when he became Prime Minister. That's my firm conviction, and once the negative focus has moved away from Europe, he will examine a stronger involvement with other countries."

The six-page memo sets out plans for the establishment of a new European Monetary Fund that can intervene in the economies of debt-hit eurozone countries. In Effect It says: "Limiting the effect of treaty changes to the euro-zone states would make ratification easier, which would nevertheless be required by all EU member states (thereby less referendums could be necessary, which could also affect the UK)." It will be seen as a massive surrender of sovereignty by the nations involved.

He said: "We've got an Opposition Day on Tuesday, so it was the ideal time to call for the referendum and draw up the motion. The UK Still Suffers Terribly From The Way Things Have Evolved Within The European Union And It Is High Time We Grabbed Back Control And Regained Power Over Our Destiny." The debate will be seized on by eurosceptics desperate to keep momentum going following Mr Cameron's decision to walk away in the face of French implacability, and refusing to sign up to a treaty change demanded by a Franco-German alliance that would impose fiscal union on profligate eurozone states.

The Prime Minister's move leaves Britain standing alone against all the 26 other European member states which have indicated they will agree to the "Merkozy" deal. Mr Cameron decided to use his veto after French President Nicolas Sarkozy refused to meet our modest demands to safeguard Britain's interests. Chancellor George Osborne yesterday praised the Prime Minister for battling to protect the UK financial sector, which accounts for 11 per cent of our gross domestic product and employs hundreds of thousands of people, from a flood of new European regulations.

He maintained: "If we had signed this treaty, if David Cameron had broken his word to parliament and the public - gone there and caved in without getting the safeguards he was looking for - then we would have found the full force of the European treaties, the European Court, the European Commission - all these institutions enforcing those treaties - using that opportunity to undermine Britain's interests, undermine the single market."

"We were not prepared to let that happen."

Others are even calling for Britain to be driven out of Europe altogether. German Euro MP Martin Schulz who is due to become President of the European Parliament next year, said: "I doubt in the long term whether Britain will stay in the EU. The EU can, if necessary, do without Britain, but Britain would have more difficulty without the EU."

Gunther Krichbaum, the chairman of the powerful EU committee in the German parliament and a political ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, said: "The Treaty of Lisbon explicitly opens the possibility of a country's withdrawal. The British must now decide whether they are for or against Europe." Elmar Brok, a senior German Christian Democrat Euro MP, said the EU "must now marginalise Britain, so that the country comes to feel its loss of influence".

The new "fiscal union" bloc within the EU - made up of the 17 euro nations and their allies - is due to hold monthly summits from next year. While Britain will be excluded from the gatherings, Whitehall officials are braced for a string of new initiatives that will have an impact on the UK economy. One Whitehall source said: "A decision taken by the Euro-Plus summit is a fait accompli for the EU. If what the Euro-Plus decides will be translated into an EU decision via its in-built qualified majority, Britain won't have a chance to influence EU decisions on economic, social and employment legislation that overrides its national law."

Some EU officials believe that Britain's financial services sector is still under threat from more tax and regulation despite Mr Cameron's veto of EU treaty changes. One diplomat said: "Cameron sank the treaty talks with a demand for protections for the City of London. The resulting grouping will be a battering ram to force through EU decisions, taken by qualified majority voting." Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the Green Euro MPs in the European Parliament, said: "Now we must put pressure on the British and force them, by implementing tough regulations on financial markets, to decide if they want out of the EU or stay inside."

Now forecasters are warning that storms will hit the south-east over the next few days, with wind speeds reaching 100 mph. The Met Office has issued yellow warnings for strong winds and heavy rain on Monday night for most of England, with the south-east expected to be hit hard. Windy weather is expected to continue into Tuesday, with the potential for "severe gales" or storm-force winds across Northern Ireland and the southern half of Britain. There could also be frequent, heavy showers, bringing the risk of flooding.

Aisling Creevey, a forecaster with MeteoGroup, the weather forecasting arm of the Press Association, said it was too early to tell where the winds would hit. She said the country could expect winds of between 80 mph and 100 mph. "It is very difficult to know at this stage where exactly the storms are going to be," she said. "There's a system coming through on Tuesday and again on Thursday We could see gusts of 100 mph in some places but there is very little confidence about exactly where." A Met Office spokesman said: "Strong winds on Monday evening have the potential to cause some disruption, especially in areas exposed, to the south."

"In addition, rain will turn persistent and heavy, bringing the risk of surface water flooding over south-west England and Wales. At this stage there is some uncertainty and the public are advised to monitor forecasts to keep up to date with this warning."

Mr Clegg used the BBC's Andrew Marr programme yesterday to engage in a very public therapy session after what had obviously been a traumatic couple of days for him. Expressing his pain, the Lib Dem leader said the veto - which he had been described as endorsing on Friday - was 'bad for Britain' because, in the words of the familiar euro-federalist cliche, it left our country 'isolated and marginalised'. So much for the constitutional doctrine of collective Cabinet responsibility that is supposed to bind the Government together publicly on all points of policy.

However, it is hardly surprising that Mr Clegg has reached breaking point. He is a fully-subscribed euro-obsessive, unable to see any wrong in the misjudgments, corruptions and idiocies of the EU. Indeed, he shows a Moonie-like faith in the institution. He sees everything through a Euro-prism. It distorts his own world view and hopelessly undermines his judgment. Even today, he cannot bring himself to condemn the basket case of a currency that is the euro, and the absurd one-size-fits-all basis upon which it was constituted.

While it is, also, crystal clear to most rational people that the 'plan' to which Mr Cameron would not sign up in Brussels will not work, Mr Clegg appears to trust it implicitly. Being a former MEP and one-time bag-carrier to Lord [Leon] Brittan, the former European Commissioner, he has a blind faith in the single currency and the whole project of 'ever closer' union. Mr Clegg's Europeanism may partly derive from having a Dutch mother and a Spanish wife. Also, on his father's side he has Russian, German and Ukrainian roots and he commendably speaks five languages.

All this seems to have put the deputy prime minister at a distance from a the very idea of Britishness, and from the hopes, beliefs and aspirations of most of the British people. Also, Mr Clegg should be warned that the only thing that will make the Tory Euro-sceptics even more gleeful than they are today following Mr Cameron's use of Britain's EU veto would be if the Lib Dems broke the Coalition. Such a move would precipitate a January election that the Tories would win, to judge from the massive support expressed already in opinion polls for Mr Cameron's stand.

Meanwhile, France accused Syria of being behind attacks that wounded French soldiers in the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) on Friday. Most of Damascus was shut down, but Assad's soldiers forced some shopkeepers to open their stores, and in some cases simply kicked in the doors and opened the stores themselves. Indicative of Assad's weakness and paranoia was a report from the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram Sunday that his aides are afraid of an assassination attempt on the president-dictator.

SANA, the official government news agency, is acting as if nothing unusual is going on in the country except for "terrorists" who have killed several soldiers. Hundreds of troops have defected, and there were heavy casualties on both sides in Sunday's battles that brought the country closer to a civil war. The death toll since the beginning of the uprising is impossible to verify because of the government ban on foreign journalists and its jamming of Internet connections, but the number 4,000 appears to be an understatement.

In addition, thousands have been wounded.

It comes as a leading economist has forecast the UK will fall back into "outright recession" next year. Gerard Lyons, Standard Chartered's chief economist, has predicted the UK will contract by 1.3 per cent in 2012, far more than the official forecast of a 0.1 per cent fall in the final three months of the current year. Mr Lyons said the fall will be caused by "a squeeze on incomes, the tightening of fiscal policy, low confidence and the hit to exports from a recession in Europe. It will be both a tough domestic and external environment".

He suggested the Chancellor will have to borrow more to stimulate growth. "While the low yields the UK now pays help keep debt payments down, this should not be their only benefit," he said. Calls for a fiscal stimulus could be reinforced by the BIS study, which suggested the Bank is running out of ammunition to rekindle the recovery, having just increased its money printing programme from 200 billion pounds to 275 billion pounds. In its quarterly report, BIS cited reasons why QE would have a limited effect. "In terms of programme size relative to the amount of outstanding debt, the purchases might be subject to diminishing returns," it said.

The analysis shows that QE accounts for about 30 per cent of the free float in the UK, excluding QE2, compared with about 20 per cent in the US. Analysts have questioned whether the Bank is running out of policy measures.

It is happening just as Europe's banks slash their books to meet the EU's core Tier I capital ratios of 9 per cent. The Basel-based Financial Stability Board - the collective voice of the world's monetary authorities - fears the banks could inflict a 2.4 trillion euros crunch over "coming months", just as Euroland crashes back into recession. It is hard to imagine a more reckless recipe for social disorder than to combine these shocks at once.

Europe's mishandling of its affairs is now grave enough to alarm the Pentagon, presumably well-briefed by the DIA, NSA, and ECHELON network of electronic eaves-dropping. "We are extraordinarily concerned by the health and viability of the euro because in some ways we're exposed literally to contracts but also because of the potential of civil unrest and break-up of the union,'' said General Martin Dempsey, chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Many of those EU leaders who went along with this summit accord - including France's Nicolas Sarkozy - must know that it is Medieval leech-cure treatment and can only drain the lifeblood from large parts of wasted Euroland.

The tension would not exist if Germany and its satellites had their own hard currency, reflecting their hard economy and the tastes of their own hard-working peoples. A free float would restore equilibrium by natural means, consistent with Kultur. At the end of the day, it always comes down the one core problem, the euro itself. Monetary union itself blocks any plausible solution. We have not advanced one inch.

Everything was over after half an hour. At that point the summit, which was expected to be a historic one, had not even begun, and yet it was already clear that it would not end well. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy had met with British Prime Minister David Cameron at 7:30 pm on Thursday evening. Their goal was to determine how far Great Britain would be willing to go to support the German-French plans to save the euro. Not very far, it would soon become clear.

Cameron demanded extensive exceptions for his country in the event that the European treaties would have to be amended. Most of all, however, he wanted the British financial sector not to be subject to European supervision. Merkel and Sarkozy quickly made it clear to Cameron that that would be unacceptable. And so the summit, which was intended to be a turning point in the struggle to save the euro, ended up marking a major turning point in the history of the European Union. In the middle of its biggest crisis to date, the European Union is divided and Great Britain has been sidelined, possibly for the long term.

The remaining countries want to follow the 17 members of the euro zone on the path to the sort of fiscal compact Merkel and Sarkozy have outlined. They want it to become a so-called "stability union," with balanced budget provisions to be written into national constitutions and automatic sanctions for deficit offenders. It's the kind of union that Merkel believes is inevitable.

But many countries are only following the Germans' lead with reluctance. The agreement only came about because investors are shunning the bonds of ailing euro-zone countries, and because even the strong countries are facing the possibility of having their creditworthiness downgraded by the rating agencies. But other countries that have long supported a true economic government are asking themselves why the Germans had hesitated for so long.

Great Britain is now largely isolated. As a result, it needs to ask itself what role, if any, it still plays in this new Europe.

Merkel, for her part, wants to prevent Britain and the euro zone from drifting further and further apart. She recently told confidants that it is important to give the British the feeling that they are still part of Europe. But the French see it differently, hoping that they will carry more weight in a union that does not include Britain.